Crowdsourcing is cool again, and you can join the fun of verifying donors to Trump’s inaugural

Crowdsourcing? That’s a name we haven’t heard around these parts since 2011 or so, when the New York Times sent an open invitation to readers to spend the weekend helping sift through more than 24,000 of Sarah Palin’s emails in search of juicy dirt.

If we remember correctly, that fishing expedition turned out to be a bit of a bust, which might explain why the mainstream media seemed to sour on crowdsourcing — taking a hard pass, for example, on having readers scour a dump of some 30,000 “lost” emails from former IRS official Lois Lerner, which then turned up on hundreds of disaster recovery tapes.

Just like fact-checking, crowdsourcing is now cool again, and the Huffington Post is thrilled to have hundreds of volunteer muckrakers busily verifying donors to President Trump’s inaugural. Really, it’s a party atmosphere out there the likes of which hasn’t been seen since those pussy hat knitting bees.

Right now 100 volunteers + 6 editors are collaborating to verify the identity of Trump's inaugural donors. Join us! https://t.co/Dna3e25KEN

The thing is, we’re old enough to remember the last few months, when just about every major paper and news site announced the new crack investigative team it had assembled to monitor the Trump administration. Maybe they could do the heavy lifting?

Let’s see how things are going so far:

Does anyone know an "Isabel T. John," from Englewood, NJ? It appears she gave $400,000 to Trump's inaugural, but I can't find records of her pic.twitter.com/KIt1cjL27F